The Cellist’s Journey #8 Cello and Meditation

The Musician's Journey Podcast

I don't play the cello every day.

There are in fact few things that I do every day.

When there is a voice in me that says “I should have done this today, and I didn't.” I can observe that this is a thought. It's not some voice of universal truth, or someone I know blaming me for something.

It's a thought in my head.

It's as if my thoughts don't always trust me to do the right thing…!

In fact, my thoughts are the thoughts of a lunatic. They contradict each other and are not coherent and they will throw me from one state of mind to another.

I'm not saying that I'm suffering from a mental illness here, I'm just describing the thoughts how they behave for most of us if we give them some attention.

A thought comes along and pretends that it needs to make me feel inadequate. The thought then goes away at some point without me noticing, and a new thought comes along in order to make me feel better.

If I'm not at all aware of how my thoughts are treating me, I'll be a ball bouncing between the thoughts as they please. I then leave my state of mind at any given time in the hands of my thoughts. Do I want to do that?

Sometimes we have to figure something out, of course. We plan our day, compare insurance companies, prepare a speech, whatever we need to do. But when we have achieved the task at hand, can we still be selective with our thoughts?

Cello playing can be one of those activities that lets the thinking mind step back, and instead allow for a different way of existence; existence through the tactile sensations of playing, through the sounds that we make, and through the things that happens in us when we do this: memories, emotions, images, peace of mind, or perhaps a creative idea?

I think that cello playing can also become another one of those things we have to do, and to think about how to do, and we can play the cello while we are in our mind and our thoughts. We might verbally judge what we are doing: “this is out of tune, this sounds wrong, this is difficult, I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, I hope no one can hear me, I need to practice more,” etc. These thoughts can make you decide to quit cello playing altogether, depending on how you treat these thoughts.

So here I'm proposing a change of habitual thinking.

First, have a notebook and a pen with you in your practice and write down the thoughts that come to you during your practice.

Even write down the thoughts that are not related to your practice. We typically think of something we should remember to do later, something we regret doing, a person that is important to you in the moment, whatever it is.

Then, look at what you have written down. Acknowledge them for what they were: thoughts that showed up in your consciousness.

Now, are any of these thoughts useful to you?

Let's take the thought "My playing sounds bad, I don't think I'm improving."

I'd say the thought in itself isn't useless, but it's useless to repeat it without doing anything about it. We can continue this thought by questioning it:

"What exactly do I think sounds bad? Could it be that I'm trying to do too many things at the same time so that I'm unable to focus on one thing properly? How can my cello teacher help me with this?"

Now that we have continued with the thought, we can let the initial thought go, which was "My playing sounds bad, I don't think I'm improving."

What does it mean to let it go?

It means that when we notice that it's coming back, we can say "I recognize this thought and I've already moved on from it" and we can let the thought pass by without spending more energy there.

Ok let's take the thought "I should practice more, I think I should quit cello playing because I don't have time for it."

If this thought is allowed to circulate in you undetected, it will make you feel all kinds of self-sabotaging things such as insufficiency, disappointment, or a diminished self-confidence overall in your everyday life.

I think we can agree that that's pretty useless.

Therefore, it's important to nip these thoughts in the bud and see them for what they are before they are allowed to live in us like a dark cloud.

"I should practice more." Yes, we should all practice more shouldn't we, we should just practice all day every day or else... Or else what?

Let's face it, we can always practice more.

Go and ask a music student and they will most likely say that they are not practicing enough even though they are practicing all day every day. Go ask a professional musician and they will most likely say that they don't practice enough.

We are completely stuck in a feeling of deficiency. We are never enough, time is never enough, and our music making is never enough.

Here comes the power of thought.

When we are aware of how we think and how our thinking makes us feel, and how these thoughts and feelings keep on perpetuating endlessly, we can call it out and shine a light on it.

And then we can change it.

How absurd is it to think that we are never enough? We are just living and breathing on a flying rock in space until we one day stop breathing.

Of course we're enough. We are sufficient, time is sufficient, and our music making is nothing more or less than what it is.

Our music making is something different from one moment to the next. One day it's a few long open strings where we are immersed in the vibrations of our gorgeous instrument. On another day we are enjoying the technical complexity of a scale.

Our cello playing doesn't need to be anything at all.

It just needs to be something that you enjoy.

This concludes my series of short episodes related to cello playing.

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